Bongino presents the evidence at the David Horowitz Freedom Center Restoration Weekend, held Nov. 15th-18th at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida.

DAN BONGINO: Some of you may have seen me on Fox this morning, and in fact one of the ladies I was just talking to said well, where did you do that from? I said, I just live about 20 miles north, I have a studio in my house. It’s just a TV in the background. It’s a TV, it’s actually a video of what we took down in Palm Beach, we’re just watching a movie in the background. It’s in my office. If you listen real close on Fox sometimes for hits you’ll hear some like gargling in the background, that’s usually my 6 year old running around outside. No, I’m serious. Yeah, that’s my office and it’s a really small office. I don’t live like liberals in a 5,000 square foot mansion. So once in a blue moon you can hear my kids running around. So that happened. I made it down here. Sorry I didn’t tell everybody I was here. When we went to the front desk I got caught up in a conversation with Sebastian Gorka and Louie Gohmert and we’re all Chatty Cathies so that just went on forever, I forgot to tell everyone that I actually showed up. So I am here, we made it, it’s great. Thanks to everyone who’ve already bought the book in advance, I really appreciate it.

That’s what I want to talk about today, folks, because it’s been about a year and a half now of my life. I’ve written four books but this one by far was the most tedious to put together. They had two co-authors actually help me out. And the reason I wrote the book, this whole spine scandal, this debacle, this atrocious disgrace of a scandal that happened to our president. You know how many, are there a lot of cops, federal agents in the room? Anyone have experience in law enforcement? Yeah, a couple raised their hand. If I’m wrong, call me out on this, but when I was a cop and then a Secret Service agent if you have even an ounce of empathy for human beings, which most of you in this room have more than an ounce, you have a whole lot, you’ll arrest a lot of bad people for a lot of really bad things.

But one of the things that impacted me so deeply in my life, I’m not going to say the guy’s name for obvious reasons, let’s call him john Doe. We hit a door at about 6:00 on the morning to arrest this guy on a credit card fraud scheme, and it was ugly. I mean it had been hundreds of thousands of dollars. When you’re a federal agent you don’t get to arrest people for like $5.00 petty crimes or anything like that, they’ll throw you right out of there. It was a serious crime. We arrested the guy and I remember after working on this case for 6 months it was a sense of accomplishment, tempered immediately by this awful feeling in my gut. It’s 7:00 in the morning, you arrest him and you don’t anticipate the human side of it. But what happened, the guy’s young kids ran out. That’s their dad. He actually wasn’t the worst guy in the world, he was actually a good father to his kids. And they’re watching their father in handcuffs, and the wife is crying. Their life is over.

Now granted, the guy was a bad guy, don’t get me wrong. But again, we’re all human beings and I’ve got to tell you that I mean it almost scarred me for the rest of my time. I kept thinking to myself, I couldn’t get that image out of my head. What bothers me about that and how that ties to this spy gate thing and why this whole thing has consumed the last year and a half of my life, is that guy was an actual bad guy. Imagine if you find out, you’re the President of the United States, all you did was win an election and you find out the massive machinery of the Federal government with the ability to slap bracelets on you in the form of handcuffs, take your life and your freedom was turned against you? Folks, this happened. This is the biggest scandal of our generation. There’s no close second. This makes Watergate look like Romper Room.

Now I only have about 20 minutes or so to get through this, this is usually about a 45‑minute speech, I just gave it in California. But I promise you there wasn’t one person falling asleep the entire time. I’m going to walk you through what happened. It’s all in the book, by the way, in great detail. And what we did in the book, if you choose to buy it, and that’s totally up to you, I’m happy to sign it and I won’t leave until I sign every one of them, but read the footnotes. We deliberately did not use footnotes from right-leaning resources. I used CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times because anyone who tells you oh, this didn’t happen, just go to the footnotes and say, did you read this article? It happened, folks. The President of the United States had the intelligence community and the law enforcement community of the United States, at the highest levels, weaponized against him.

Now, I like to break it down simply as to how they did this. They had Plan A, Plan B and Plan C, and the joke of the whole thing, and when I say joke I don’t mean funny, I mean a tragic joke, is it wasn’t known as Plan A, Plan B and Plan C; you know why? They thought Plan A was just fine, so it was just the plan. When Plan A failed they had to move on to Plan B and then Plan C was just the cleanup operation. Here’s how this whole thing starts against Donald Trump.

During the election the Obama administration, which had done whatever it wants because the media’s lost in this country, folks. There’s no media, forget it, that’s dead and buried. The media is done, they don’t do journalism anymore, it’s activism, nothing more, right? The Obama administration had grown comfortable with the idea of weaponizing government against their political enemies, and it happened over and over again. We had the IRS scandal, we had the AP phone records scandal, the Jim Rosen, Fox News scandal. And I ask you this, what happened to any of the people involved? Anyone? Yeah, the answer is nothing. I have to do zeros like this now, because I used to do zeros like this but I found out through the liberal media that somehow this means like a white power symbol now or something. I thought it meant okay or zero, but the media says, no, I’m serious, like these idiots in the media will tell you, so now I do zeros like that because I’m like afraid of some media idiot, these people are crazy.

The Obama administration had gotten completely comfortable with the idea of abusing government for their political means. So what happens? This plan gets hatched, and I’m going to be candid with you; where exactly it’s hatched nobody is exactly sure to this day. As a matter of fact, if you’re familiar with my commentary on Fox, I say often one of the great mysteries of this case is what’s Paragraph 1. Paragraph 1, what do I mean by that? When I was a Federal Agent, when you arrest someone you have to do what’s calls an MR, a memorandum report. Paragraph 1 of that MR is always how the case started. I got a call from Jane Doe, bank fraud investigator, said this credit card number was stolen on April 14, 2015. I made a few calls and the next thing you know it’s an 80-page report about this massive scheme. Paragraph 1 though always lays it out, always. Do you know to this day we still have no idea what Paragraph 1 was—why they started to spy on the Trump team? I get it, it was for political, I get that. But at some point somebody, you have to understand folks, how to put down on paper a semi-legitimate reason to start the most massive spying operation in a political campaign in U.S. history. Do you know nobody to this day will tell you what that is? I know what it is.

The first plan they do to hit the Trump team, folks, is they learn to manipulate things about queries in the NSA database. The NSA has a database of a whole boatload of information; meta data, tax, that kind of stuff. How it works is too complicated in the time I have, but what you can do is you can query that NSA system and you can get a whole lot of information. But what happens? This is Plan A, this is how they’re going to get the information. I hope that if you’re not following, please stop me because this is important. The Obama administration figures out that through unmasking, in other words wiretapping people, pretending they’re targeting foreigners, and then querying information in this database, that they can get all the political opposition research in the world that they need against the Trump team. It’s beautiful, no one’s going to call them out, the media’s on their side, right?

But there’s a good guy in this, there’s a white hat, somebody in the government sniffs this thing out. That’s why I tell you, this wasn’t Plan A, this was the plan. They were going to unmask people, wiretap people and they were going to query this NSA database and get all the information they needed about the Trump team. But somebody smells a problem, and he’s not having it, and he’s the white hat, he’s the good guy in this story, and it’s Mike Rogers of the NSA.

Mike Rogers of the NSA senses that there’s something wrong about these queries. In other words, who’s tapping into the database here and making political queries? Now folks, some of you, I don’t know your politics, I assume most of you are conservative, libertarian or Republican, but that’s fine either way. If you doubt any of what I’m telling you, just Google the FISA Intelligence Surveillance Court, their report about queries. Because Mike Rogers goes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and says, Houston, we got a problem. These queries are supposed to follow very specific guidelines about terrorism and all these metrics, you can’t just spy on Americans in the database. The FISA court looks into it, comes back with a report that was released in March 2017, ladies and gentlemen, that is devastating. If you haven’t read it, you are doing yourself a great disservice. Page 80 specifically is horrifying. Apparently the NSA database was being queried by private contractors working with the FBI, these were not even government officials. People within the government were using private contractors to query information they had no judicial or legal authority whatsoever to look at.

Rogers smells a rat. People panic in the government. Now, conveniently what happens right after the election? I’m going to put these pieces together and things will start to make sense. Donald Trump’s elected, he’s the President-Elect, right? Ten days after the election, Rogers, who knows this has been going on the whole time—these unmaskings—the tapping of the Trump team. They tapped Trump Tower. Now does it make sense? He got the wording wrong? He didn’t understand exactly how it worked but the idea was not wrong. Donald Trump’s not stupid, trust me. The guy got elected president, earned a billion dollars. By the way, I love how these journalists criticize him. Sure, the guy’s making $25,000.00 a year writing click bait pieces for buzz feed, Donald Trump’s an idiot. Hard pass, brother. Well, the guy just won the presidency. The guy runs for office the first time and he becomes the president, but wait, yeah, let me listen to Joey Bagadonas at buzz feed, you’re right, you got this.

It’s like so about 10 days after the election of Donald Trump, someone goes up to visit Donald Trump in Trump Tower. Who visits him? Mike Rogers. But Rogers doesn’t tell anyone, this is going to trip you out totally. He doesn’t tell anybody in the White House he’s going up there. He visits Trump in Trump Tower, conveniently 10 days after the election, which from my experience in the Secret Service is just enough time for them to go up to Trump Tower, WHCA, the White House Communication Agency for the President-Elect and set up a SCIF where they can talk privately, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility. In other words a place where no one can listen in. Rogers gives it about 10 days, goes up there, has this big meeting with Donald Trump, and what happens the very next day? Donald Trump evacuates Trump Tower and goes to Bedminster, New Jersey to never return for another meeting. You think that was a cawinky-dink? Like he did that by accident? Oh, let’s just go up to Bedminster, I’ve got nothing else to do.

Now, again this is all in the book in intricate detail. It’s the greatest spy story ever told except for the fact that it actually happened, and it happened against you. Rogers has this meeting, Trump evacuates Trump Tower. The very next day the Obama administration comes out and calls for somebody to be fired; who’s that somebody? Mike Rogers. And they start blaming it on things like drone strikes and other stuff; like really? Could you be any more obvious? The Obama administration knows Rogers is the good guy and fills Trump in on this entire debacle. He probably goes up there and says brother, they’re spyin’ on you, like right now. He doesn’t know, but now he does. So he leaves.

All of a sudden people start resigning from the Federal government after that. You know who also resigns? Bob Hannigan. Now, who’s Bob Hannigan? Bob Hannigan is the head of the GCHQ, which is the British NSA. But why do you think the head of the British NSA would resign right after that Rogers meeting, right after Trump finds out about this massive spying operation? I’m going to tell you why right now, I’m not taking a selfie of you, I’m not taking a selfie of myself, I’m going to read to you a headline. This is from CNN, see it right there, I didn’t photoshop this. April 14th, 2017, remember who Bob Hannigan is, he’s the head of the British NSA, British Intelligence and passed Trump associates’ communications with Russians onto U.S. counterparts. You think I’m making this up? That’s CNN, I didn’t write it. They wrote that. So not only is the United States government in Plan A, weaponizing its intelligence community to listen in and computer search the Trump team to hurt them during the campaign for political opo, they’re working with the British and the Australians to pass information about the Trump team onto the Obama administration. Don’t take it from me, take it from CNN.

They find out about this. Now, this thing breaks down about halfway through it. They move on to Plan B. Sorry, there’s a lot more to Plan A, but in the interest of time I want to get through this because the cleanup operation is important. They move on to Plan B; what’s Plan B? They realize Rogers is onto them. They’re like hey folks, we better ease up on the unmasking and the tapping into the database, people are getting caught, this is probably not good, we’re leaving a massive paper trail, and what if we lose, right? They move on to Plan B. Plan B’s a cross fire hurricane. They say well, listen, if we can’t spy on them illegally let’s just spy on them legally. We have this beautiful thing called the FISA Court where we can walk into the FISA Court, we can get a warrant on somebody and when you get a warrant on somebody in the Trump team they have this beautiful thing for the Obama administration called the two hop rule. Well, it’s for everyone, it’s for Obama.

Meaning, if I spy on you, and you’re a member of the Trump team, I can hop to everybody you emailed and then everybody they emailed. So basically all I need to do is get a FISA warrant on the guy cleaning the floors in Trump Tower, and I’ve got everyone. Because if he emailed his boss and his boss emailed Don, Jr., I get everybody. Beautiful, right? Not really. Because they were stupid. They were dumb, and they screwed up. The problem with the FISA Court, unlike the unmaskings and the tapping into the database is they had to produce actual evidence in front of a judge. There was a judge in a FISA Court that needed evidence that the Trump team was working on behalf of a foreign power, but critically doing it in violation of at least one U.S. law. Folks, they had nothing. They had zero. Do you understand that they, to this day, have absolutely zero. Zero. Remember, don’t do it one hand, that’s a big mistake. Media people, you’ll be a white power person after that. You always do it that way. They had zero evidence at all, and you think it’s funny, I’m only half kidding, that’s how worried I am about the media, they’re so crazy these days, right? They had nothing on collusion, nothing, zero.

So what does the FBI and the State Department and the DOJ do? They say well, we don’t really have any evidence, let’s just make it up. We’ve got this guy we worked with in the past, this guy Christopher Steele. Now I’m going to do something, I’m not taking a selfie, again I’m not taking a picture of you, don’t you worry. I’m going to read you another headline, you need to write this down because this one’s going to blow your mind. Any of you read the dossier? You haven’t, right? Not many people have. You should. If you haven’t read the dossier, don’t you worry, because the dossier was already written back on April 17th of 2007. You go: what do you mean, I don’t get it. You mean 2017, right? No, no, no, no, no, I didn’t get that wrong.

It’s written right here in the Wall Street Journal, on April 17, 2007. Who’s the author of this critical Wall Street Journal piece? Glen Simpson and Mary Jacobi, his wife. Glen Simpson, the purveyor of Fusion GPS. The article is called, How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington. Folks, I dare you to take a moment and read that piece, put it next to the dossier. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing. It’s the same story. It was written 11 years ago. Glen Simpson clearly had this information about Russian influence in Washington he wrote 10 years ago. Read the names in the article. Do you know who appears in this article? Paul Manafort, all of these players. So what likely happened after Plan A collapses is, they say listen, let’s go to the FISA Court and do this legally, but we need evidence. We don’t have evidence. Don’t worry, Hillary Clinton’s got a guy at Fusion GPS, says he’s got a story to tell. Ladies and gentlemen, Glen Simpson took his Wall Street Journal piece like it was a movie script, scratched out the names, put Donald Trump’s name in there and said look, do orthopedic injury have a story for you guys. It’s all B.S. The whole dossier is crap. Read the article, it’s a movie script they recycled. It’s a fairy tale, it’s an Aesop’s Fable. It’s made up. It’s a scam. There is not a scintilla of evidence that it’s true.

Now, the big question on Plan B, till I move to the mop up operation, Plan C. Now they’re in trouble. They’re in a lot of trouble. Because they realize the dossier in and of itself is crap and a lot of people at the Bureau know it. They need to buttress it with some stuff to make it a little harder. Now is where the Michael Cohen story comes in, Trump’s lawyer.

In the dossier is a very specific allegation, right? That Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, went over to Prague to set up this whole information exchange with the Russians, right? Well, what’s the problem? Michael Cohen had never been to Prague, and his passport proved it. Where do you think they got that name, Michael Cohen? You’re darn right, they probably were in that NSA database looking up a Michael Cohen and they got the wrong guy. I know there’s only one Dan Bongino. I can tell you for sure there are a whole lot of Michael Cohens, right? John Smith, John Brown, Cohen, these are common last names. They got the wrong Michael Cohen. So now you should be asking yourself, who the heck was Glen Simpson dealing with in the government that gave him that name? And how did they get it?

Plan B falls apart, too. Plan B falls apart because something happens in November, Donald Trump wins. Nobody, I’m telling you, take it to the bank, cash this check and spend the money, nobody saw that coming, no one. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to get in, this was all going to go away, they were going to appoint their own Attorney General, probably John Brennan and this story is never, ever to see the light of day, not in their lifetimes. But make no mistake, they know what they did. They all know what they did. Every single one of them.

So they have to move on to Plan C. Plan C, I call it Clean Up on Aisle 4. Now they’re in trouble. They know they’ve got white hats in the government. I know one of them right now that’s still in the FBI, that’s unquestionably cooperating with this investigation if you know how to read the tea leaves. And if you read the book you’ll figure out who it is. People start cooperating and talking and now people are panicking. Now does the John Brennan’s meltdown after the election make sense? He’s the head of the intelligence community who, again another thing for you to Google, but it’s all in the book, again, who do you think John Brennan met with right before the election at the “director level as reported on by multiple media outlets: Bob Hannigan, the same guy from the British Intelligence Agency that quits right after Trump’s election. He quits 10 days after and doesn’t tell anybody about it. He says oh, I’m leaving for family reasons. What do you mean? You related to Donald Trump? What do you mean, family reasons? Family reasons, the reason that you’re leaving is because Donald Trump got elected.

Who also quits? John Carlin. Who’s John Carlin? He’s the head of the Department of Justice National Security Division, the final division in the Department of Justice to put their John Hancock on the FISA warrant. He quits right after the election. Who did John Carlin work for? Now clean up on Aisle 4 is going to start to make sense. Who did John Carlin work for before he got there in the DOJ? He’s Bob Mueller’s chief of staff. He was Bob Mueller’s chief of staff. Now does Bob Mueller make sense? Clean up Aisle 4, get the mops out. Everybody realizes they’re all going down; they faked the FISA warrant, they have been involved in massive unmaskings. Susan Rice, Samantha Power, they have been busted by the FISA Court tapping into the NSA database for queries. They left a paper trail 65 miles long. Bob Mueller has to clean this whole mess up. Bob Mueller, did you notice how right away they had the name? So Bob Mueller’s old chief of staff, is the cleanup guy. Listen, make no mistake, Bob Mueller’s job right now is one thing and one thing only: keep the heat on Donald Trump relentlessly for anything, for jaywalking, ripping off mattress tags, combing his hair the wrong way, keep the attention on Trump no matter what because the minute the Bob Mueller thing is resolved, all of this is going to come out and it is hell hath no fury. Folks, they left a paper trail. They can’t run from this.

Mueller is brought in to get Trump impeached because they don’t want any of this to see light of day. Now why Mueller? Mueller knows every player involved in this and has intimate connections with all of them. The guy who signs off on the B.S FISA warrant, John Carlin, his old chief of staff, his chief bulldog in the case, Andy Weissman. Andrew Weissman worked with Bob Mueller. Andy Weissman was the chief prosecutor on the Enron case when Bob Mueller was the FBI director. Remember the Enron case that they screwed up royally? That’s how they know each other. Andy Weissman hates Donald Trump. He’s done emails congratulating Sally Yates for telling Donald Trump to go pound sand. Oh, it gets better.

Who else does Bob Mueller know? On Bob Mueller’s Enron team, it all goes back to Enron, that same Enron team headed by Andy Weissman had another lead lawyer on the case who wasn’t Kathryn Ruemmler. Who’s Kathryn Ruemmler? Obama’s White House counsel who was Obama’s lawyer while all of this was going on. They know each other. Now you may say, fine, so Bob Mueller knows Obama’s lawyer while this whole spy-gate thing was going on. What’s the big deal? You Google George Nader Daily Beast, you can read an article today. It just popped up today before we showed up. One of Bob Mueller’s lead cooperators in this case who’s been selling out members of the Trump team from Day 1 is a guy named George Nader. Who’s George Nader’s lawyer? Kathryn Ruemmler. Obama’s White House counsel and Bob Mueller’s buddy. The lawyer for the lead witness in this case feeding information to Mueller is Obama’s White House counsel otherwise known as the fixer. She fixed everything for them. She was involved in Benghazi, she was involved in the IRS, she was involved in the Secret Service scandal. Just Google her name, put in any one of those things and who’s the person giving the statement? Kathryn Ruemmler. Who was also on that Enron taskforce? Lisa Monaco. Barack Obama’s Homeland Security and counterterrorism advisor in the White House while all of this was going on. They all know each other.

Your final piece to the cleanup on Aisle 4 operation: Who else does Bob Mueller know? Who now has judicial—excuse me—legislative control over this? I should say, right now in the Department of Justice, right? Rod Rosenstein, right? Because Sessions had recused himself, now Whitaker’s in there which was a good appointment, right?

A case happens a little while ago, the TENEX case. It’s around 2015 or so. It happens in Maryland. I’m familiar with it because I worked in Maryland as a Secret Service agent in Baltimore. I wasn’t involved in that case at all but I know the office well. The TENEX case goes down in Maryland. The TENEX case, a cooperator for the United States government paid $50,000.00 by the FBI, comes to the FBI with some troubling information that the Russians are helping the Iranians build their nuclear program and that there’s a company helping the Russians get a hold of our uranium. It’s called the TENEX case. It was the precursor to something you may have heard about: the Uranium 1 operation. The same players are involved. The case gets thrown out on a BS press release on a Friday night so nobody would pay attention. Everybody’s gag-ordered and it all goes away, that the Obama administration and FBI-paid informant admitted that we were giving the Russians uranium while they were building the Iranian nuclear program and chanting death to America. Who was the lead prosecutor on that TENEX case, the precursor to Uranium 1? Rod Rosenstein. And who’s the FBI director? Bob Mueller. Folks, they all know each other.

This is the biggest scam in American history. Folks, I beg of you, I really do, you cannot let your legislative people, your congressmen or anyone off the hook. Whatever connections you have, you need to keep the heat on this because if these people don’t go down, the right way, unlike the Obama administration tried to do it to us, this will happen again. I’m telling you, what they did was such a grotesque, horrendous abuse of power. It disgusts me to this day and I will never ever forget that story about that guy we arrested and his crying kid that morning who wasn’t going to see his dad for another year. That’s a horrible thing to have to do to someone and it’s a grotesque thing to do to someone, to unleash the power of the federal government when they did nothing wrong. And Donald Trump did nothing wrong and if you read the book, and by the way, it’s not a narrative. You don’t have to read it straight through. It’s written like a police file. I think that’s why it’s been selling like crazy. You can read the last chapter first. It’s written like a police file because the names, like I said, this is an hour long speech I compressed into 20 plus minutes.

The names never stop coming up again. Ever. Oleg Deripaska connected to Vladimir Putin who’s connected to Adam Waldman, a lobbyist who’s emailing and texting Mark Warner, a democrat on the senate committee. Who’s Waldman working for too? Christopher Steele, the guy working for Hillary. They’re connected to the Russians. The people that show up at the Trump Tower meeting. Veselnitskaya with Don, Jr. and Rinat Akhmetshin. Veselnitskaya works for Fusion GPS on a separate case and Akhmetshin, the other guy, the Russian intel guy that shows up at the Trump Tower meeting, you know who his lawyer is? Edward Lieberman. You know who Lieberman’s wife is? Evelyn Lieberman. Bill Clinton’s old chief of staff. Read the book folks; it’s all laid out for you. So, thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.